Enhancing source location privacy in UWSN: A multi-channel approach to minimize collisions, retransmissions, and power consumption

Abstract

Existing strategies to address the Source Location Privacy (SLP) problem can be divided into two categories: extending the transmission path and deploying fake sources. These strategies do not consider the issue of transmission collisions. Transmission collisions lead to retransmissions, which result in a large amount of power consumption especially in underwater wireless sensor networks. More retransmissions also give attackers more opportunities to trace the location of the source. In this paper, we analyze and confirm that an increase in the number of transmissions increases the probability of an attacker locating the source. We propose a Channel-Hopping-based Source Location Privacy protection protocol (CHSLP) to reduce the number of transmissions by using multiple channels. CHSLP determines the number of channels used by each node based on its number of neighbors and the frequency of its packet transmissions. It then uses the Chinese Remainder Theorem to design a channel hopping method that ensures that any two nodes will have a rendezvous. The goal of CHSLP is to maximize the safety threshold. Compared with existing protocols, CHSLP can effectively reduce the probability of collisions and improve the safety threshold.